Show #5 starts off with some Windows and Mac tales before settling down into its more traditional science fiction and fantasy fare. This time around I talk about The Greatest Games I Never Finished (Diablo II, A Fool’s Errand, Legend of Zelda: Orcina of Time), the appeal of the Wheel of Time series, and offer some thoughts on The Ring/Ring 2 soundtrack, as well as getting permission to review music in the podcast.

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I post new episodes of Radio Active every week or so. Comments–particularly audio comments–about the podcast are always welcome, and can be sent to nuketown@gmail.com (which should have more than enough space to handle any audio notes).

Show Notes

Opening Quote: “It’s Got Raisins in it … you like raisins.” — Better Off Dead

Bug, a lime-green iMac that I bought for my day job when I first arrived at the university, has come home. The computer is about five years old, and had been replaced by a PowerMac G5 next year. Since I’m getting an assistant at work, I needed to free up some space, so I asked if I could adopt bug — the university was cool with it, so I brought it home.

Only has 128 mb of ram, and is running Mac OS X. Still works like a charm however, and — because of a hard drive failure about two years ago — has an 80 gig drive.

Planned on using it for Jordan, but couldn’t get IE to hit Disney or PBS Kids. THen realized it needed Flash updated; once Flash 7 was installed, worked perfectly. Now she can use it (with my help of course) to surf her sites, and can happily use the keyboard and mouse.

Island of Lost Games

Diablo II

Never finished it — got sidetracked by Warcraft III, and the birth of my daughter.

Decided to return to it now when I was thinking about doing a column about the great games I never finished.

Had forgotten how satisfying it was as a hack’n’slash game.

Other games I never finished but should return to:

A Fool’s Errand: Classic old puzzle game for the Mac; still have it on my iBook, and really, really need to concentrate on finishish it. Sequel: A Fool and is Money” is coming out after a dozen-odd years sometime in the next year or so.

Legend of Zelda: Orcina of Time: Loved this game on my N64, but went to the future too soon and got stuck. Hoping that it’ll return in some form on the Nintendo DS.

Warcraft: Frozen Throne: Got half-way through the campaign, my computer died, and I didn’t have any backed up save files. Really want to pick up that campaign again.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Robert Jordan’s 10-volume Wheel of Time series, listening to them as audio books.

I know a lot of folks don’t like them, arguing they’re too long, or two cliched, and while I see their points I’m still hooked.

Why? I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and a post on Amazon.com finally nailed it down for me: it’s like a D&D campaign. The poster meant it as a bad thing, but as a DM who *loves* huge, sprawling, multi-year campaigns in which dozens of plotlines are spawned, and only a handful are pursued, I LOVE this.

In fact, it’s sort of wish fulfillment for me, letting me “read” a campaign with multiple adventuring parties scattered across a continent, each engaging in its own individualized quests that only occasionally overlap.

Reviewing Soundtracks

My plans to do soundtrack reviews are on hold temporarily.

I want permission to use track excerpts. I asked a rep for one of the PR firms that sends me soundtracks about their podcast policy, she went back to the folks who make the music, and apparently set of a bit of a firestorm as they realized they didn’t have a policy on that. So hopefully they’ll figure it out soon ’cause man, I really want to review the Deadly Spawn on here.

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About Nuketown

Nuketown is a speculative fiction website that's been published continuously since 1996.

It's publishing focus is articles, reviews and editorials about science fiction, fantasy, and horror with heroic or libertarian overtones. It covers a variety of topics within the speculative fiction genre, including games, movies, soundtracks, books, and websites.